Going Live with Beta 2

Jeff Beehler wrote a good post on what it means to “go-live” on Beta 2 and steps you need to take in order to get support. The only thing I’d add to his post is a little tempering of “high standards of quality”. I want everyone to understand that it is a Beta. If you are going to go live on it, you need to be prepared to live with some bugs. Last I checked the TFS product still has about 300 known bugs to fix after Beta 2 and we are doing another test pass right now that will yield more bugs to fix.

Just yesterday we were having a discussion with our MVPs about a bug where bulk saving work items (like from Excel) where there are multiple different types of work items in the list will cause gaps in the assigned work item IDs. It’s annoying to see your work items numbered 1, 3, 7, 8, 10, etc instead of 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 but causes no real harm. It’s a known bug and will be fixed before release. However there was an interesting discussion about how this kind of thing could cause some customers to “lose confidence” in the Beta.

My feedback is if annoying things like this will cause you much consternation, don’t go live on the Beta. There’s a lot of cool stuff in the Beta and I believe that you’ll benefit tremendously from using it but be prepared to live with working around or turning a blind eye to some defects. It is a Beta, after all, not a released product. We’ll have worked out the remaining issues by the time we release. The Beta is an opportunity for you to help make sure that the product will work very smoothly in your environment and your scenarios by the time we are done.

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I decided to add dynamic data types and optional/named parameters to a program I’m working on when I saw C# 4 supported them. I found that the support for SQL Server SMO library wasn’t in .NET 4, so I ended up removing all the SMO code from my program. If you don’t have something you really need no matter what the inconvenience and you aren’t willing to make those kinds of hard decisions, you shouldn’t be using a beta product. So far, beta 1 has been rock solid for me and all the new stuff I’m using is working like the (albeit limited) docs say it should. Try driving a car off the assembly line when it still doesn’t have a windshield, and it shouldn’t be a surprise you’re going to get bugs in your teeth.